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Daily Archives: November 1, 2017

Week nine of our fall Fantasy Movie League is now past and the pre-Halloween weekend was a boon for scary movies.

The week started off with a toss up over which movie would make a solid anchor based on the initial pricing and revenue estimates. The choices were:

Jigsaw $277
Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween $214
Subrubicon $150
Geostorm $126
Happy Death Day $90
Thank You for Your Service $89
Blade Runner 2049 $67
Only the Brave $59
The Foreigner $55
It $38
American Made $31
Kingsman $29
Same Kind of Different As Me $27
Victoria & Abdul $27
The Snowman $26

The top two new players on the list were Jigsaw, a continuation of the Saw series of movies, and the Clooney/Coen brothers film Suburbicon, with last week’s top earner, Boo! 2, stuffed in between. The initial box estimated put them at about $12, $10, and $8 million respectively, which meant that you could build a pretty solid lineup out of any of them.

And then Jigsaw started getting some traction in the press. While the die hard Saw fans were saying that no picture in the franchise had ever opened for less than $18 million, Variety and a couple other sites coming out mid-week with estimates in the $20 million range made that a more solid statement.

Meanwhile Suburbicon, always a stretch given the rather rarefied air in which the Coen brothers can operate, started to tank in estimates. $8 million became $6 million which became $4-5 million, all of which scared any watcher of the industry off of it as an anchor choice.

So Jigsaw became the clear anchor. At anything close to $20 million it would not only take the week but also be the best price performer. I estimated that if it could just get past $16.6 million it would be a shoe-in for both. Then it would be a matter of what five films would fill in the other screens.

I went with the maximum three screens of Jigsaw, two screens of It, and three screens of American Made, a mix which happened to also spend my entire $1,000 budget.

My Fall Week Nine Picks

And then we were off to the movies.

As it turned out, Jigsaw did better than initially projected, but broke the “$18 million or more” streak that the Saw fans were touting in support of the film. That number is now $16.6 million.

$16.6 million was also the number I felt it had to get past to be the best price/performer, and in not managing get over that hurdle I was at least correct in it not hitting that goal. Instead it came down to a tight race between It and The Foreigner which It won in the end. That made the perfect pick three screens of Jigsaw, three of It, and two of Victoria & Abdul.

Fall Week Nine Perfect Pick

Two people in the Meta League, SynCaine and Elly, both managed to get the perfect pick for week nine, a feat they shared with 736 other players, netting them each $71,714,400. The standings for the week ended up as:

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $71,714,400

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $71,714,400

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $66,269,674

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $64,035,847

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $59,991,939

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $59,195,899

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $55,345,800

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $54,933,396

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $53,631,625

Kraut Screens (T) – $51,618,295

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $49,834,984

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $41,511,450

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $22,861,476

Meta League Legend:

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

The $2 million per screen price/performance boost plus the $5 million perfect pick bonus lifted SynCaine and Elly ahead of the pack. That latter bonus is pretty much all that stands between those two and Darren who only failed to go with Victoria & Abdul as his final two screens.

Meanwhile The Filthy Fleapit was all in on Suburbicon, with six screens of it in play, and paid the price as the film didn’t even clear the revised low-ball estimates, hitting only $2.8 million.

That left the overall season scores as:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $713,575,565

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $696,474,327

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $665,149,476

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $657,200,029

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $649,461,284

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $642,534,788

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $628,121,469

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $610,758,036

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $606,814,839

Kraut Screens (T) – $521,195,924

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $513,988,818

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $503,564,714

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $360,657,754

The big changes on the list were Elly jumping up to third place and SynCaine passing me to take the lead in the the TAGN league and fifth spot overall. Again, the weight of the bonuses is seen both. The gap between us now adds up to the bonus for one screen of It and the perfect pick bonus. He has won four of nine weeks in the league, but the bonus is what put him in the passing lane. Kraut Screens also passed The Filthy Fleapit largely on the latter’s poor showing this week. Thanks a lot Suburbicon.

And now we’re looking at week ten with Halloween behind us and another superhero blockbuster weekend with Thor: Ragnarok hitting the screens. As often happens in such weeks, Thor is expected to dominate so hard that it has been broken up into three picks for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Certainly Bad Mom’s Christmas, another new title this week, isn’t going to threaten it. The lineup is:

Amazingly, or perhaps optimistically, Suburbicon stayed on the list this week. Just barely, but there it is.

I think the lesson from past three day splits is to avoid Friday and take some combo of Saturday and/or Sunday plus the right mix of low price titles to fill in your screens. Getting the right mix there can make or break your bid, as we saw in week nine, and there are a lot of possible choices at the low end.

Told in the comments of the last post that the event now scales pretty broadly, I hauled out more characters to run it on Sunday, a few more on Monday, and last night, as Hallow’s End prepared to fade, I went through other servers looking for likely candidates to press into service.

A lot of dusty old characters, neglected for years, were suddenly sent into action, including the inevitable hunter who still had a quiver with ammunition equipped.

I will say that the Heirlooms system was extremely useful, as there was a lot of questionable gear on some of these guys. I had to choose a spec, assign talents, and throw some heirloom gear onto them and send them into the fight. A few even leveled up.

I actually did pretty well with random hunters. I am actually glad I have so many strewn about on various servers. I also sort of figured out how to do DPS as a mage after a couple of tries. Rogues though, I probably shamed the rogues guild with my feeble stabs. The one character/class I didn’t get to run was the Demon Hunter. As it turned out, the one I rolled last year was still in the starter zone and I couldn’t queue him up until I finished. It was more efficient to just move on to another character.

So lots of runs over the last few days, but no luck. The mount did not come my way again this year.